• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, September 18, 2019

What do you get when you combine minds looking to create buzz at Pizza Hut with willing co-conspirators at Kellogg’s? Stuffed Cheez-It Pizza, apparently.

“It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like,” reports  Michael Hollan for Fox News. 

“Now available nationwide, the new ‘pizza’ looks like a giant Cheez-It, albeit stuffed with mozzarella cheese (pepperoni is also available). A single order comes with four large squares containing the mozzarella inside a cheese-baked crust. It also comes packed with a side of marinara sauce for dipping,” Hollan elaborates.

Instagram provides a visual, as well as customer feedback such as “OMG ME AND MY DAD LOVEEE PIZZA HUT IMA ASK HIM IF HE WANTS THEM FOR DINNER” and “Ended up ordering it and having it delivered to my Grandma cause she loved Cheese-It’s and then ended up curious so i ordered it for myself and I must say it was a Win-Win for us both.”

“We pride ourselves on being the go-to for unexpected pizza innovations, and I can’t think of a better partner than Cheez-It to bring our next original menu item to life,” Marianne Radley, chief brand officer of Pizza Hut, is quoted as saying in a press release published on the Hutlifeblog. 

The release goes on to state that “customers are craving these kinds of mashups between beloved food brands more and more,” Jenny G. Zhang observes  for Eater under the headline “Pizza Hut and Cheez-It make college students’ and stoners’ dreams come true.”

The marketers are “correctly identifying a real trend and as good a reason as any to crank out more menu items like Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Tacos and KFC’s Cheetos Sandwich. The future of fast food may not look exactly like this stuffed Cheez-It pizza, but it does look like the shape of it (in a way not dissimilar from streetwear): brands teaming up with brands for limited-time ‘drops’ of items designed for the hype machine,” Zhang adds.

The Takeout’s Aimee Levitt gives  the Stuffed Cheez-It Pizza a B- on the taste-test scale. “At first it was too much: too much salt, too much cheez. Then I dipped it in the marinara, which was the standard Pizza Hut product, watery and very sweet. And somehow that balanced the whole bite. It was the sort of moment that restores my faith in fast food: They know what kind of monsters we are and know how to satisfy our basest urges,” she writes. 

Appearance-wise, it “looks like a toasted ravioli,” Levitt says. It has 240 calories per serving, along with 15 grams of fat and 430 mg of sodium.

“Pizza Hut said that the inspiration for the Stuffed Cheez-It Pizza came from a major demographic of its customers: college students. But the chain’s creative team also thinks the new offering will be a win-win for orders during football games (Pizza Hut is an official sponsor of the NFL this year), or for families looking for an easy weeknight fix with a twist,” Erica Chayes Wida writes for Today.com. 

“Now all people need is an affordable box of red wine to pair with their Cheez-It pizza,” she adds. “Oh, wait, Cheez-It already did that.”

In another gustatory combination you might call equally ungainly if it weren’t loaded with calories, “KFC is sweetening up the Chicken Sandwich War with its test of Fried Chicken & Donuts in Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia, and Pittsburgh restaurants,” Kelly Tyko tells us in USA Today.

“KFC’s test includes the Kentucky Fried Chicken & Donuts Sandwich with a chicken fillet between two glazed doughnuts for $5.99 and the Kentucky Fried Chicken & Donut Basket meal, with choice of chicken on the bone and a doughnut for $5.49 or $7.49 for a big basket.”

No wonder that “the average height of a man in the United States increased by a mere one inch in the 42 years between 1960 and 2002. However, within that same stretch of time, the average weight of an American male leaped from around 166 pounds to 191 pounds,” as Vincent Iannelli, M.D. recently pointed out  on VeryWellFit.com.